This White Paper volunteers the perspectives of MCEER’s
Executive Committee on factors to consider in the formulation of a national research strategy for
disaster loss reduction. It is a commentary on the Grand Challenges
for Disaster Reduction report, published by the Subcommittee on Disaster
Reduction (SDR) of the National Science and Technology Council Committee
on Environment and Natural Resources.

In the paper, MCEER advocates that a critical part of this research effort should focus
on the mitigation of, and response to, the impact of extreme events on critical
facilities and lifelines. The failure of these key infrastructure systems
is the cause of most of the disruption during and following disasters.

In
this context, national needs require that solutions be integrated across
various hazards. However, the objective to achieve a synergy of solutions
across the continuum of hazards is something that has just barely begun to
be exploited or even investigated.

The White Paper develops a series
of recommended research initiatives that should be undertaken in a multi-hazard
perspective. These initiatives are illustrated by selected MCEER accomplishments relevant to the research requirements outlined in the SDR Grand Challenges report. They are:

Expand loss assessment methodologies and decision support tools to include multiple hazards, based on existing tools developed for earthquake engineering, calibrate them with ground-truthing, and automate and integrate data collection using remote sensing following disasters.

Develop intelligent or “smart” public buildings and lifelines that provide real-time monitoring and decision making that is useful for both regular maintenance purposes and also for occupant safety, security and health monitoring to allow for rapid evacuation in the event collapse is imminent and for locating survivors within collapsed structures.

Investigate how new materials and advanced technologies developed for seismic retrofit can be modified or adapted to provide enhanced resilience of various critical facilities and lifelines against other hazards.

Identify new mitigation strategies and technologies that can provide simultaneous protection against more than one hazard, for a single cost, and similarly develop new technologies that achieve the broadest possible level of protection at the least possible cost, aiming at more uniform, nationwide adoption of these technologies.

Build on the accomplishments of regional economic modeling for earthquake impacts, and extend these models to multi-hazard scenarios, providing the ability to quantify economic consequences of disasters as an effective basis for setting priorities, as well as the communication of these priorities for public and/or private investments.

Develop technologies to prevent cascading failures of complex lifeline systems that duly consider proximity of critical infrastructures, interoperability of various lifeline systems, and interactions among the institutions operating the lifeline networks, for a broad range of natural, technological and human-induced hazards.

Expand the resilience framework built on the concept of robustness, rapidity, resourcefulness and redundancy, and the technical, social, economic and organizational dimensions, and provide quantification of these dimensions for critical infrastructures and lifelines exposed to various hazards.

Take advantage of the body of social science research developed through the NEHRP program as a foundation to understand differences in social behavior related to various hazards, and formulate effective risk communication, detection, and warning dissemination systems across a range of hazards and timescales.

Understand how societal diversity (including age, educational and income levels, race, ethnicity, language spoken at home, the “digital divide,” etc.) is likely to influence the warning dissemination and response process, and how the decline of network broadcasting and the rise of niche-based “narrowcasting” influence the ability to both disseminate and receive effective warning information, so that the nation can develop audience-appropriate, customized warning systems and technologies.